In this article, Steve DeMott shares his experience of using Source-Live from Source Elements in a video project with collaborators thousands of miles apart. How simple is it to set up and how does it perform?

We have all had to find new ways to work over the past year. Some of the solutions we’ve leaned on have been there all along, while others were born out of necessity. Source Elements has been a major player in the remote audio world for a while.

I was able to use one of their newer offerings to get through a project that had people in different parts of the country, at a point where phone calls, Zoom meetings and email transfers had just about reached the end of their effectiveness. What we really needed was to be watching the same screen, and listening to the same playback, while being able to talk...all in real-time, in perfect sync, and all at a very high level of quality. 

The Scenario

I was working on a project where I was doing the dialogue edit and sound design for a short piece based on a Native American poem. The director and voice actor were both in New Mexico, while I live in Connecticut. That’s about 2,200 miles and 2 time zones away, so there was little chance of us being able to sit in a room to do final spotting and review. We had gotten through much of the initial edits through phone calls, email, and texts, but the last part of the project really required everyone sitting down together with the video and Pro Tools session to make final mix choices.

The big hurdle was how to share audio and video from my Pro Tools session over the internet to the producer in New Mexico, and the director, who, while local to me, was visiting family in Florida that week, all while being able to communicate in realtime. Oh, and I needed to make this happen without requiring everyone to have to purchase software or licenses on their end. So, yeah...no problem. Right?

Source-Live To The Rescue

During my research, I stumbled upon an offering from our friends at Source Elements called Source-Live. Source-Live allows for high-quality audio and video to be shared over the internet with minimal latency. It even has a “chat” function built in that allows for Zoom-like audio and video chatting, while viewing the project remotely. All everyone else needed was a Chrome browser. It seemed like the perfect fit for this project. A couple of emails later I was set up with an account, and getting ready to dive in.

The Setup

The first step was getting my Pro Tools system set up to stream both audio and video through the Source Live servers to a private viewing room I could invite everyone into. This is done right from the Source-Live app. I was able to set it to listen to my audio playback through my interface, and to display the Pro Tools Video Engine, which allowed me to display the video with audio right from Pro Tools to anyone else invited into the “viewing room”.

On the initial launch of the Source-Live app, you have to select your sources and set up your viewing room. I started by clicking setup, and then selecting “capture screen”. 

From there, I was able to select the Avid Video Engine as a screen source, effectively streaming out any video I am viewing in Pro Tools.

 After hitting ‘OK’,  I went back and right clicked on the image to reset its size to fit the view space.

I then hit the gear icon next to settings to make sure the proper audio device was set for playback through the stream.

This is also where I entered my Source Elements account info to connect to my remote viewing room. To be honest, I left the video settings at their default and just made sure the audio was connected to my MHLink domain, which is an AoIP network of my Metric Halo interfaces. With all that set, I hit Save.

I was now ready to click ‘Start Streaming’, and begin the review session with the producer and director.

The Experience

With setup done, and some pre-flight testing, I was able to invite the director and producer in to go through the final sound design and dialogue edit so we could make final edits in real-time, rather than going back and forth with emails.

Inviting people in was as easy as sharing my ‘Gateway’ link. This is my personal URL for my Source-Live account. When invitees visit that link they are presented with this screen:

They enter their name and the passkey I created and provided to them, and then they are in the ‘viewing room’:

I asked everyone to join the chat, which allowed us to communicate in real-time. We all opted to disable video feeds to keep the bandwidth manageable for those with less robust connections.

With everyone connected to Source-Live, we were able to chat while listening to the audio and watching the video playing from Pro Tools. This allowed us to go through the video and make edits, scene by scene, just like we were all in the same room. I was able to make mix edits as we went through the video. I actually connected as a viewer from my laptop to keep my Pro Tools system focused on one task.

My view from Pro Tools, with the Source Live app showing in the foreground. The video inside Pro Tools was actually displayed on a second screen. You can see the preview in the Source Live app.

That Was Easy!

By utilizing Source-Live, we were able to make the final edits to the video in a couple of hours, rather than days of going back and forth with emails and WeTransfer hand-offs. Setup was simple and intuitive, and the app worked flawlessly over a two and a half-hour session of starting and stopping, as I made mix edits in Pro Tools.

Everyone involved agreed that Source Live made finalizing the project painless. I was really pleased with how easy and reliable it was.